Heart failure death rates rising again after decade of decline

While heart failure-related mortality declined from 2000 through 2012, age-adjusted rates have started rising, a national analysis showed.

Deaths from heart failure decreased from 105.4 per 100,000 standard population in 2000 to 81.4 in 2012, adjusted for age, but then the trend reversed and went to 83.4 in 2013 and to 84.0 in 2014 (both trends P<0.05).

The total number of heart failure-related deaths had a similar trajectory, with a steady increase from 2009 through 2014, Hanyu Ni, PhD, and Jiaquan Xu, MD, of the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics reported in the December issue of the NCHS Data Brief.

"The underlying cause of heart failure-related deaths for adults aged 45 and over was less likely to be coronary heart disease, but more likely to be other cardiovascular diseases and non-cardiovascular diseases (such as cancer, diabetes, chronic lower respiratory diseases, and kidney disease) in 2014 compared with 2000," the researchers noted.

"This shift in the distribution of the causes of death toward less ischemic heart disease is consistent with the results of a community-based study on heart failure," they added. "This finding is important for heart failure management approaches."

Other trends in heart failure-related deaths seen in the analysis that have not changed since the turn of the century were the decreasing proportion occurring in a hospital versus other settings and the decline in proportion with coronary heart disease as the underlying cause of death.

The study used multiple cause of death files and deemed a heart failure-related death to be one with the ICD-10 code for heart failure reported anywhere on the death certificate, whether as a underlying or as a contributing cause of death.

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